Google Makes Shocking Revelation On Ransomeware

A Google research has shown that “Cyber-thieves have made more than $25m (£19m) from ransomware in the last 24 months.

The search engine giant worked on a lot of virtual victims of ransomware to reveal the payment network that works with the malware software.

An interview with Black Hat said. “Few of the cash was acquired in 2016 as group discovered how beneficial it was.”
However two main gangs of ransomware made the majority of the cash, it disclosed, however various variants are coming up.
Elie Bursztein from Google partnered with Luca Invernizzi and Kylie McRoberts, they all carried out the research and they later proposed that. “It’s turned out to be a more profitable avenue and it’s bound to last even longer”.

The danger of Ransomeware

Ransomware is a corrupt program that spoils a device and then scrambles and encodes document so they become useless to access. The document can only be deciphered when a person pays a price. Cash payment was usually done through the use of Bitcoin which is a virtual bank note.

“Google applied other various techniques to find out how much money was coming into ransomware inventory”. Mr Bursztein said.
He said. It then watched the web traffic set up for these victims to find out where the cash is being sent to. The data collected in this phase was then used to search for additional links of ransomware and the 300,000 files and it was broken down to 34.

Mr Bursztein also added that “The well-known strains were Cerber and locky families.”

The Payment review of the Bitcoin blockchain, which records every deal done using the e-currency, shows that two different strains were used to acquire majority the cash over the last decade, he revealed, with Locky profiting about $7.8m (£5.9m) while Cerber made $6.9m (£5.2m).